Delinquent Juveniles

You simply have to ask yourself, what kind of message, what manner of values are parents endowing their children with - when in a community where clearly it is the community's own teens causing problems in the area - where situations things can occur? That old question: do you know where your child is? originally was meant to bring home to parents that their youngster might be in some kind of danger through their neglect.

The question, over the past decade and more has increasingly meant something significantly other; more about do you have any idea what your child is up to? The company they're keeping? The activities they're engaged in? Their mode of thought and action? There was a time - that hoary old legend that keeps being repeated - when parents seemed more concerned with engaging with their children, with leaving them under no illusions with respect to the behaviour they expected from them.

That was back when parents seemed to take greater responsibility for the calibre of the life lessons their own lifestyles were teaching their children, augmented by family discussions about ethics, morals and values, and accepted societal normatives. Oddly enough, this is also the era where parents, even while farming their young children out to day-care-givers, hover anxiously over their children.

There appears a division between those who are too absorbed with their children and give them too little breathing space and opportunity to develop their personalities based on the guidelines the parents have stressed, and those parents who are uninvolved with their children, allowing them to pick up whatever values they find suitable, without mature adult guidance.

Possibly, it was always this way. Responsible parents as distinct from irresponsible ones. There have always been juvenile delinquents and often enough these young people come from homes where the kind of social and material support inclusive of firm discipline was absent. But it is the increase of serious social problems surfacing with ever younger teens that leads to the suspicion that sociopathy is on the increase.

There are more than enough incidents of young boys and girls in their teen years being apprehended by the police and charged with violence, with robbery, and with murder. Possession of drugs and use of alcohol seems almost endemic in some neighbourhoods and unfortunately present at a lower scale, in many others. Bored young people who have been given material goods and lack emotional support, look for distractions from their daily lives.

In an Orleans neighbourhood, residents have recently become startlingly aware that they have severe problems with the safety of their young children. They have long been aware that teens have been using a relatively-new playground bordering on an urban forest to leave behind broken beer bottles, but no one in the neighbourhood could have imagined that someone was rigging the playground equipment to endanger young children.

A resident just happened to notice utility blades that had been affixed to playground equipment. Someone had gone to the trouble of melding them with the metal of the playground structures, sharp ends pointed upward to extract the maximum damage on tender young flesh. "Last year, they were playing so much in there that they set fire to the forest", commented one parent of young children.

Obviously, they've upped the ante on the excitement-and-danger quotient, their delinquent imaginations having no compassion whatever for the children that could have been caused great physical harm.